By: Max Sparber
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| DMBQ at the Entry - Photo by Max Sparber (click for full set) |
Even setting up at the 7th Street Entry, Japanese band DMBQ looks dressed to perform. They wear tight pants that bell at the bottom, hip shirts that make them look either like bike messengers or all-night clubbers (it's funny how much the two looks dovetail), and bassist Ryuichi Watanabe is crowned in a flyaway perm, as always. They plug in their instruments and run through a speedy sound check, playing a few lightning-fast, Jimi Hendrix-style guitar riffs. Guitarist/vocalist Shinji Masuko moves his guitar toward a large speaker behind them, testing out its feedback, which is impressive. And then they leave the stage again. To what end?
Well, a change of costume. All come back in florid and absurd blouse tops, decorated with floral prints, a look that one of my companions accurately likened to that of Thai prostitutes. Ryuichi Watanabe has augmented his gigantic perm with a spectacles contraption that puts two bright red LED lights on either side of his face, so that when his mane covers his features, as it will frequently, two glowing eyes will seem to peek out, as though he were some sort of beast that roams an alien landscape. The drummer, Shinji Wada, is dressed much the same as his fellow players, but his clothes are torn up the sides, hanging off him like rags. The band strikes an assortment of faux heroic rock and roll poses, and then they start to play.
It is impossible to provide a playlist for their set. The band is eclectic and experimental, favoring long improvisational jams, their songs conjoined to one another by a wail of feedback or a particularly sharp guitar lick. Indeed, in the hour and a half that they play, they only stop once, a very brief pause between two songs. Instead, it is only possible to describe their music and their performance style, both of which are outrageous, absurd and thrilling. The band borrows heavily from the proto-heavy metal psychedelic music of the late '60s and early '70s. There is Hendrix, of course, with his swirling, acid-tinged guitar playing and his primal electrified folk-rock arrangements, but there is also the fantasmogoric blues of Led Zepplin and the sound experiments of early Pink Floyd, all updated with an aesthetic that favors pure noise and the constant thrum of feedback.
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| Ryuichi Watanabe of DMBQ - Photo by Max Sparber |
They are a very loud band, and they produce a very dense thicket of sound, nearly impossible to parse in live performance. Instead, you just get blasts that are briefly aurally recognizable from the sonic wall they produce -- a series of beeps that sound like might be produced by a passing UFO, a scalding guitar lick that sounds as though a song by garage band greats The Sonics were about to start. Shinji Masuko sings occasionally, but sings is really the wrong word for it. He howls tuneless, or screams at the audience, or just makes noise with his mouth, tunelessly. It could be the soundtrack to a '60s biker movie, but only the scenes when the film's Hells' Angels-style motorcyclists have gotten hold of some very bad acid and have started to mutilate themselves, or others.
The wildness of their music is easily matched my their stage antics, which are frenetic. They tend to march around the stage quite a bit, legs widely spread, knees buckled, guitars swinging, making grotesque faces, often looking like they are parodying gorillas; on occasion they will flail their arms in the air like giant movie monsters. Guitarist Toru Matsui has an unnerving habit of simply sticking his guitar in his mouth and holding it up the way a dog would hold a bone or a newspaper, walking around the stage. The top of his guitar shows the unhappy results of this: Visible teeth marks. No, that's not descriptive enough, as chunks of the top of the guitar are missing. Matsui's guitar has been visibly gnawed, leaving dented, splintered, unpainted wood visible, in the same way that the viscera of a tree is visible when a beaver has had at it for a while.
The band likes to kick while they perform, they like to jump, they like to thrash their guitars in the air like weapons. They frequently storm to the front of the stage, thrusting their heads directly at their audience, inches from listeners, whereupon they make distorted faces and extend their tongues, gargoyle-like. They crouch down on the floor and play, cloistered from the audience, seeming near collapse, and then lunge to their feet to kick at the air again and storm at their audience.
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| Shinji Masuko and his strange device - Photo by Max Sparber |
Toward the end of the show, Shinji Masuko takes his guitar over to a set of speakers and simply props it up against them, creating a drone of feedback. He leaves it there and scoops up a strange device that looks a bit like a gas mask, a bit like the sort of headgear that teenagers who have just had to have their braces removed must wear at night, and a bit like some terrifying fetish device you might see in a particularly unnerving magazine about modern sadism. It has a black microphone sticking out of part of it, the part that fits of his mouth and nose, and he tugs at his hair so that it cascades through the device's various black straps. He staggers around the stage in the device, again resembling a creature from a giant monster movie, waving his hands menacingly and simply roaring, his voice echoing and reverberating through the microphone, overloud and inhuman.
After doing this for a while, he seizes Shinji Wada's drum kit, dismantling it even as Wada continues to play. Shinji Masuko hands the drum kit, piece by piece, to the audience, directing them with stabbing, energetic hands. Audience members seize the drums and rebuild them on the floor of the 7th Street Entry, and when Shinji Wada has no more drums on stage, he leaves it, stepping down and sitting at the rebuilt drum kit on the floor. The remaining band members also abandon the stage, swirling around Shinji Wada as he pounds his drums, shredded garments flying about him. Embedded within their audience, DMBQ snarls and twirls, cacophonous and ecstatic. Shinji Masuko pulls off his mask and lets it, and the microphone in it, fall to his feet. He grabs Shinji Wada's drums again, pulling them away from the drummer, and piles them one atop the other, making a small tower. Then he climbs to the top of the tower and produces a lighter. Then he pulls his tight, belled pants down, exposing his pubic hair. Then he sets his pubic hair on fire.
With that, the show is over. The band abandons their instruments and walks 14 feet across the room to a small table, where they begin to sell t-shirts and CDs, looking weirdly collected, like guys hanging out at the back of the bar, as though nothing had just happened, as though the smell of burnt pubic hair wasn't still acrid in the air of the 7th Street Entry.
Location Info:
7th Street Entry
Artist Info: DMBQ
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